After finishing Joi Ito's post Reading the Dictionary, I was reminded that I actually did enjoy reading the dictionary, in same way Seymour Papert liked playing with gears. But, to Joi's point, I didn't set out from aardvark and press on until zebra. Instead, I realized today, the dictionary was my first true hypertextual experience.

Since I'm still on winter break, I took the better part of today to mess around with my new (well, secondhand) Kinect. I used the excellent freenect library and its Python bindings to whip up this simple little demo.

There's a lot here that is very similar to how we work in SMALLab, especially how we deal with a "buttonless" interface. Using the Z-axis (forward and back on the Kinect, up and down in SMALLab) makes for a pretty nice way of changing from active to inactive state.

I'm looking forward to playing with this some more in the future. It's not the most response system in the world, but I can see simple and casual uses for this kind of interaction in schools, public displays, etc.

The Education Issue: SMALLab (or a simulation of it) on the front page of the New York Times educational-technology issue.If you picked up a copy of an actual newspaper this weekend (I had to make a special trip for it), you may have seen the cover of the New York Times Magazine with an odd pie chart on it. This is SMALLab, one of the research projects that I've been working with for a long time alongside other Parsons faculty and students.

I thought I'd add a small contribution by breaking down what's on the cover here for posterity. In the top right, Kees is holding one of the mocap controllers that the students made in the classroom at the beginning of last year. It's a big Styrofoam ball with four chopsticks poked into it. Each chopstick is topped with a retroreflective ball, which is what we use to track the position of the controller when we shine infrared light on it from each of the twelve cameras in our OptiTrack system.

We loved these controllers so much that, instead of being temporary tools for teaching about the system, we've kept them for over a year now and have even moved them into Quest's new location with us. If you look very closely, you can see the first name of Claudio Midolo, another of SMALLab's researchers who helped design the controller-building exercise (and helped put this one together--hence deserving his name on it.)

In the bottom right corner is an example of one of the custom controllers we've made to handle a variety of scenarios in SMALLab. This one is a paddle I designed and built for the Raft scenario. It's one of a series of controllers that Claudio and I made, which also included forms that looked like pumps and metal detectors.

The Ball Controller: Look close and you'll see Claudio's name!The whole projection image is something Kyle Li put together. It's not actually a real scenario--he built a fully functioning one that is much more interesting to look at (as well as being playable and fun.) But the Times had this gigantic photography rig over the SMALLab mats on the day they shot, so the motion tracking wasn't going to do much of anything with that hulk in the way.

Anyway, that's just of bit of the back story behind the image you see there. We're continuing to develop things with all new controllers and additions to the technology, in many new and exciting subjects, so expect our next SMALLab cover model to be even cooler.

Round 19: Behold the penultimate round at GDC!That's right, Backchatter is now free software! After my colleagues and I at Local No. 12 wrapped up the game the Game Developers Conference this spring, we made the whole thing open source. You can find it on our SourceForge page. And check out our freshly completed documentation.

Great panel session at SXSW! I presented "Playing with 140 Characters" alongside my Local No. 12 colleagues Colleen Macklin, John Sharp, and Eric Zimmerman. We had a very positive reception on the session's twitterfall, which is always gratifying. A really nice end to a busy week up in the air.

The internet is a potentially powerful tool for enhancing learning environments. However, the unstructured nature of it can present a challenge to both students and teachers. For example, students may lack the ability to pursue a learning goal strategically and therefore find themselves overwhelmed by the amount of information at their fingertips and wandering aimlessly. Teachers, on the other hand, may be at a loss of how to assess students' learning in such a setting and unable to understand the connections that students' are making.

Reflecting Pool Mockup Screenshot

Reflecting Pool (see attached interactive PDF) aims to improve internet-based activities for students by increasing metacognitive awareness (i.e., planning, monitoring, and control of thinking) and for teachers by giving them greater access to the thought processes of their students. Furthermore, it offers a unique opportunity for all to understand and explore the collective knowledge of the class.

Here's another pass at some more of the 9/11 Pager data that was released by Wikileaks this week. I did some work earlier that explains most of what I'm doing. This time, I tried to improve the visualization. I'm also using a directed graph of domain names that appear in the messages as they relate to the unique pager numbers.